Child of the Hand
by lurker2209
Summary: Luke Skywalker never rescued Mara Jade on Nirauan. Instead she strook a deal with Soontir Fel, a deal that will dramatically impact the life of her 13yearold daughter Zia.


**Child of the Hand**

**Part I of the Destiny of Light Series**

Luke Skywalker never rescued Mara Jade on Nirauan. Instead she strook a deal with Soontir Fel, a deal that will dramatically impact the life of her 13-year-old daughter Zia. Major characters include Mara Jade, Luke Skywalker, Fel family, Talon Karrde, Shada Du'kal, Solo's and OC's.

Disclaimer: Star Wars is the property of George Lucas and the characters in this story are the property of Zahn, Alliston and others. I am making no money from the writing of this story.

A/N: Thanks to the Wraiths for friendship and support and to my betas: Amy, Kate, Killy, and Claire

**Chapter 1: Strange and Somber**

When she was sent away to live with her mother, everyone said Zia Jade was the most peculiar, sickly, somber little girl they'd ever seen. Anyone who also knew Mara Jade additionally wondered how such a mousy child could be the daughter of the fiery Trader, and what in the world the two would do with each other. If Zia had known anything about her mother, she would have worried herself.

Mistress Havshem said it too, when she was walking about Kelpsis Seminary for Young Ladies showing the new Games Mistress the grounds. Zia was sitting in a garden sketching the Sports Pavilion, quite unaware that she had any family besides her Aunt and Uncle Hemming and her five cousins. The Sports Pavilion was where the students of the Seminary kept their hoops and balls and sports clothes and played snatchball with an antigrav shuttle and wooden racquets. It wasn't a very striking sort of thing to draw, but the rosebushes were blooming and Zia had already sketched most of the other Academy buildings. She might have sketched people instead, but no one would sit for her, and she could never get the faces right anyways.

Mistress Havshem hadn't meant to be cruel when she told Mistress Lokhed that Zia was strange and somber, for she was some ways away and not speaking very loudly, but a gust of wind caught the words and carried them to the little girl sitting against the hedges.

"You should watch her in the games classes," Mistress Havshem continued, "and keep her active. The doctor says she's not as liable to be sick if she avoids the wind and gets exercise. She hasn't got a Danian constitution, the doctor told me. Her father was a spacer or some such sort, and she must have got it from him. Mistress Hemming is her aunt you see, and her people come from somewhere around Remtiln. Mother and Father both died in a fire when she was just a mite…"

Zia stopped listening. She had heard it all before many times in her thirteen years. People said a great many things they didn't mean for children to hear if the children were very quiet. And Zia was always quiet. The only time she ever drew much attention to herself was when she sneezed. Big terrible sneezes whenever the gardener-droids cut the grass, or the fletch-blossoms bloomed. Zia hated sneezing, and coughing and sniffling for that matter, but there was little she could do to stop it.

Mistress Havshem and Mistress Lokhed walked into the Sports Pavilion and Zia chewed on her lower lip as she tried to capture the movement of the flag at the top of the structure. It was always more difficult to draw things that moved, like the Dorm Mother's catling, or the fountain in front of the school, or her little cousins, who always wanted to be painted and never sat still. Zia had never found it difficult to sit still in her entire life.

Maybe not never. Drea was coming, with Tannika and Shoshanna, and Zia felt an urge to run and hide in between the Dorm Building and the gorse bushes. She didn't, though. They were too close, and she'd be seen. So she stayed where she was, back against the corner where the hedges wrapped around the Sport's Pavilion lawn, and tried to draw the flag. Or at least she acted like she was trying to draw it, but all her attention was focused on her cousin approaching.

"Hello, Zia. We're going to play rashball on the east lawn. We need another player, and Shoshanna said I could ask you." Rashball was played with little hoverdiscs that had to be led with a long stick through a course laid out on the grass. Zia always hit the disc too much so that it went off the course, or too little so it never got anywhere. Whoever was on her team would loose for sure.

"No thank-you," she said stiffly, hoping another of Shoshanna's friends would come along and rescue her.

"Well, you needn't get in such a snit over it." Shoshanna sniped.

"Really Zia, after all we've done for you, you could be a little bit gracious." Drea asked. "Mother did ask me to look after you, but you're always so stiff and proud."

"As if she has anything to be proud of," Shoshanna interjected, "her complexion's too ashen to think of and her nose is far too big for her face!" She laughed at her own joke, and Tannika laughed too. Even Drea chuckled, her hand over her mouth as if she knew she shouldn't.

"Are you sure you won't play, Zia?" she asked.

But Zia was too mortified to say anything and just numbly shook her head.

"Alright, we'll have to find Lashelle," Shoshanna said to the others as they marched off. "I told you we should have asked her in the first place, Drea." Tannika said something Zia didn't hear and all three laughed. It was probably about her.

Shoshanna was right of course. Her nose was too big for her face. So were her blue eyes, and her wide mouth. And her skin was sort of a grey, sickly pale color, though not as pale as it had been when she'd had the Menagrian fever. Her hair was a dull reddish color and hung limply in its ribbons. No, she was not a pretty girl. She'd never worried about it before coming to school. The droids had never cared, and the nurse was too worried about her being so scrawny to care about her looks. But at Kelpsis Girls Academy, there were lots of pretty girls. Drea was one of the prettiest, with her glossy brown curls and pink complexion, and dark eyes with long eyelashes.

Of course, Drea didn't quite mean to be so cruel to her cousin. Drea was a pretty, lively girl, who had always been petted for being pretty and lively, and always been friends with girls who were much like herself. Shoshanna's father was an Elector of Kelpsis, and to be Shoshanna's friend was to be Someone at Kelpsis Seminary for Young Ladies. Drea wanted very badly to be someone. She liked her cousin well enough, and tried to include her when she could. Only Shoshanna never much liked Zia, and Zia always seemed to want to be left alone.

Zia only knew that if she had been prettier and less tongue tied, Drea and Shoshanna would have liked her. But as she didn't have the slightest idea how to be less plain or more clever with words, she regarded the case as hopeless.

The next morning was Penday, and on Tergday and Penday Zia didn't have any classes with Drea. She also had art class those days so they were her favorite. But when Zia woke up in the morning and went to breakfast she had a pit feeling in her stomach. It was almost as if it were a Sekday or a Quanday, when she had literature and Mistress Fostern made her read aloud. Shoshanna would laugh at her mistakes and Zia would only stumble more because of it. But it was Penday, and after a while the pit feeling went away and Zia thought that it might just be hunger. She hoped she wasn't falling ill, but then she hadn't been ill in ages, which for Zia was about 2 months. She was in math class, something she liked well enough, when Mistress Havshem walked into the classroom.

"Mistress Roosren, I need to speak with Miss Jade in my office. I'm sorry to interrupt your lesson."

Zia didn't think she'd done anything worth getting in trouble for, but she hated having to walk to the front of the room with all those eyes on her, thinking that she was in some horrible trouble. Mistress Havshem took her hand and walked down two floors to Mistress Tollusant's embroidery class. Zia stayed in the hall while the Headmistress walked in and collected Drea.

They walked up to Mistress Havshem's parlor in silence. Mistress Havshem's mouth was drawn into a thin little line, and Drea looked afraid of something. Zia felt as if the pit feeling was growing again in her stomach.

They went into the parlor and the Dorm Mother, who they all called Mother Hashing, was standing with her handkerchief to her face as if she'd had a great shock. Zia remembered once when a delivery had come from the spaceport in a flashy speeder and the delivery boy had been a girl with cropped hair, dyed blue, and wearing boy's clothes. Mother Hashing's eyes had gone quite wide and she'd said in a started little voice, "That's not Caldanian, not Caldanian at all."

Zia wondered perhaps if something not Caldanian had happened now, and she was quite right. Mother Hashing had drawn Zia and Drea to her sides as if they were very homesick little girls, while Mistress Havshem began to speak in a very agitated tone, clutching a letter in her hands.

"I've just had the most dreadful news," she began, "quite dreadful, and most shocking." She paused as if she wasn't sure how to go on. "I suppose there's no way of breaking it gently. Your parents," she looked at Drea, "went boating on the Fluas River and there was an accident with the boat and…" she trailed off.

"Are they all right?" Drea gasped.

"I'm afraid…they're...they're gone, child." Mistress Havshem finally managed to say.

"Gone?" Drea was shocked.

"You mean…dead?" Zia asked.

"Dead!" Drea shrieked.

"Well…y-yes." Mistress Havshem confirmed.

"No! No, no, no…" Drea buried her face in Mother Hashing's lap, sobbing. Zia looked around, first to Mistress Havshem, who stood rereading the letter she must have memorized by now, then to Mother Hashing to was stroking Drea's hair. She wasn't quite sure what to think, or feel. She'd never known her own parents, never cried for them. Her Aunt and Uncle were very kind to her; perhaps she ought to be crying over them. She glanced to Drea, still crying, and slowly put her hand on her cousin's shoulder.

Cherith Fel loved two things: flying and languages. And that was why she was actually looking forward to her school break this year. General Baron Soontir Fel didn't believe that vacations were times for children to devote weeks to laziness. Each of the Fel children was assigned a project during the breaks, often simple chores around the base or home.

_But this task is going to be fun, _Cherith thought as she walked down the wing that housed the government administration offices. She hadn't been in this part of the Hand of Thrawn installation very often, but she was following her father's instructions very carefully. It'd be humiliating to get lost and have to ask for directions.

_This is it,_ she pushed open a door that said Special Advisor for Galactic Affairs. The woman in the front office was a Chadra-Fan, which surprised the girl. Cherith had seen a number of aliens in her fourteen years, but most of them were Chiss.

"You must be Cherith," she said.

"Yes," she replied, cursing herself for staring like an idiot.

"Good, I'm Flusik. Jade is in there," she pointed out a door, "with your assignment."

"Thank-you Flusik," Cherith replied briskly and walked through the door. The office inside would have passed her father's inspection. Not a paper was out of place. Father had said that Jade had spent a great deal of time with smugglers and rebels, but apparently she retained the imperial efficiency.

"Good morning Ma'am," Cherith resisted the urge to salute, not knowing what to do with her hands.

"Good morning Cherith. Did you sleep well?" Mara Jade rose from the desk with a dancer's grace and smiled softly.

"Yes, thank-you ma'am." Cherith replied, a bit perplexed by the question. That was something her mother asked her over breakfast, not her superior asked when she reported for duty. "I'm ready for my orders."

"Well, first, stop calling me ma'am," Mara grinned, "It makes me feel old."

"Yes ma'am…I mean…" Cherith wasn't sure what to say instead.

"Just call me Mara," she said, as she put a datacard in a pad.

"O, I couldn't do that. It wouldn't be respectful." Cherith protested.

"I thought it was respectful to follow orders," Mara replied, with another strange smile.

"Well…yes…" Her father had told her to do everything Mara Jade told her, but Cherith didn't think he meant this.

"Good then. This message was sent from Getold in response to our invitation to attend the trade distribution summit." Mara handed her the data card. "The computer spit out nothing but gibberish. Can you make sense of it?"

"I think so." Cherith scanned through the pad. "The Getold language is…historical. They do not express ideas very directly. A reference to Frenlo might actually mean jump because Frenlo is a character in a Getold myth about jumping over a river, or it might mean faith because the river was wide and dangerous, or blue because Frenlo always wears a blue tunic."

"Sound convoluted." Mara observed.

"It is," Cherith agreed. "The Chiss believe the whole Getold society is inefficient, but deciphering their language is fascinating."

"To you maybe," Mara said. "I just need to know if they are coming to the conference. There's a desk next to Flusik you can use, and a computer terminal. How long do you think it will take?"

"A day, maybe two. I will have to eliminate alternative meanings." Cherith explained.

"Alright. Let me know how it goes."

Cherith slipped out into the outer office and Mara slowly shook her head. She'd only been on Nirauan for a few months, managing relations with outside, which for now meant clandestine trade agreements with Karrde, but every interaction with the Fel children confirmed her first impressions. The children were miniature soldiers, marching around their home and school. Well, maybe a little time spent with some smugglers would lighten the girl up a bit.


End file.
